Making music from electrophysiological data – combining art and science

“This has been an amazing project involving some of the finest scientists and musicians I know,” says biotechnologist and sound artist Fredrika Gullfot, who has turned ion channel data – and other cellular signals – into musical compositions.

Follow this link to hear a short excerpt from the concert, on our LinkedIn page.

Fredrika Gullfot reached out to the SciLifeLab unit Chemical Biology Consortium Sweden (CBCS), who have assisted her in accessing raw data files from ion channel measurements – one of the data types used for the music. The data has been obtained using QPatch, a system for high-throughput measurements of ion channels.

“It’s certainly a fun and unusual project, to say the least,” says Nina Ottosson, staff scientist at CBCS and expert in electrophysiology and the automated patch clamp technology.

Ion channels are proteins in the body that are responsible for conducting electrical signals and have a critical function in the body.

“without them, the heart cannot beat, and nerve signals cannot be transmitted. When the ion channels open, ions of a specific type pass through, which in the case of the measurements Fredrika has used, are potassium ions. She has then used the measurements of the potassium currents and created music from them – how cool is that!,” says Nina Ottosson.

Listening for thousands of hours
Fredrika Gullfot uses an interface that converts measurement data from patch clamp runs into voltages. These voltages control the pitch of different oscillators, which are the sound generating components of a synthesizer. The sounds are then processed with different filters and modulators in the synth to get different sounds and dynamics.

“I have spent a lot of time listening to these sounds, to kind of find the musicality of this material and make longer compositions. I’ve probably listened to thousands of hours of different cells by now,” says Fredrika Gullfot. It turns out that some ion channels were particularly suited for musical compositions. “The different ion channels have their own characteristic sounds – melodic motifs, if you like – depending on how they are affected.”

In the first piece performed in a concert at The Cell, Forskaren, the ion channels Kv7.1 and hERG, which are affected by voltage changes, were involved. The voltage across the cell membrane determines how many ion channels are open and thus how large the current will be. In the second piece, the GABA A receptor, a ligand-gated ion channel that is affected by different concentrations of the neurotransmitter GABA, was used.

The beauty of life
When Fredrika Gullfot switched from biotechnology to electronic art music a few years ago, she couldn’t get over the similarity between our bodies and how synthesizers work.

“After all, art is a fantastic tool for interpreting our world and how we experience it, just like science. The idea of creating music with biological material is not new, but I really wanted to go deep with this. Especially when it comes to this kind of cutting-edge research, like electrophysiology or ion channel research, there is so much unexplored territory artistically. There is so much beauty at the heart of life, it is so rare and so different,” says Fredrika Gullfot.

Going forward, she hopes to continue with the Symphony of Cells – the musical artwork performed at The Cell*.

“There are countless ion channels and cells left to explore musically. It feels like we are just getting started. I also want to further develop a prototype for playing polyphonic music directly from the cells, without the detour via recorded measurement data,” says Fredrika Gullfot.

Among the microscopy images used in the background at the concert were mitosis in HeLa-Kyoto cell line, by SciLifeLab Director Jan Ellenberg, based at EMBL Heidelberg at the time of imaging. Other images courtesy of Zeiss GmbH.